Friday, December 14, 2012

"i love my Master and i think He loves me!" - Grammar Issues?

I will use proper grammar or be punished.
While browsing this morning, I came upon this excellent post at Bondage Blog about Submissive Written Erotica and the grammar adulterations used by newbie authors. 

It is time for a small grammar rant that has building within me for most of ten years now.
There are many many many blogs out there written in the voice of submissive persons who wish to emphasize their submissive status (or even their notional dehumanized, objectified status as a slave or a pet or a piece of furniture) in their prose. It’s an understandable impulse, and since English rules of grammar don’t have a lot of status signifiers built in, the human language response (inevitably) is to invent some.
So far, so good. That’s what we monkeys do when you give us a language. We evolve it to fit our needs of the day. Gives prescriptivists fits, but oh well, they can suck it.

How do we see this expressed in submissive writing? Well, in lots of ways; but the subject of today’s rant is the use of non-standard capitalization. A submissive or slave will often refer to a dominant by a title like “Master” or “Mistress”; and these will be capitalized just as we have long capitalized references to deities and royalty, to emphasize their exalted status relative to the speaker. The related personal and possessive pronouns will then usually be capitalized as well, for consistency and emphasis. Thus: “After breakfast my Master ordered me to fellate Him and then to lick His boots.”

We’re still solidly on the well-traveled road of language speakers evolving their usages to fit their present needs. Awesome. If a non-standard usage is not only clear, but actually does a better job of transmitting the speaker’s intent than standard usages would do, I have no beef. Again, prescriptivists will squawk, and may suck et cetera.

Read the rest of this excellent post (which echoes my opinions exactly) by clicking here.

1 comment:

  1. And this is exactly why I don't write in first person OR in present tense. Although I think I go all over the place in tense. I can't stand 2nd person. That has me all irritated. 1st person is very difficult and only a few do it well. The majority...not so good.

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